Reframing the picture: Changing the stories we tell ourselves about our lives

Delving into the difficult emotions stemming from his traumatic childhood, sociologist Corey Keyes creates a new narrative for living a contented life

Pic: iStock

IN THE mountains of North Carolina, Corey Keyes works from home, where he lives with his “childhood sweetheart”, his wife Lisa. Keyes retired last year from his work as a sociologist and professor emeritus at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

“I turned 61 in November. I’m young by ageing standards. I wanted to do more writing and have some independence from university.

“University is getting far more political, and I value my serenity, and I wasn’t finding it there,” says Keyes, who is speaking to me — on what he says is a beautiful sunny day — from the Tusquittee Valley of western North Carolina.

Author of Languishing, How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, Keyes prizes serenity. It is all the more precious because, as an almost 12-year-old child, it was in a moment of quiet aloneness that he first became aware of an
“aching kind of hunger and emptiness”.

And it was not for food, says Keyes, who roots the source of the feeling in a very traumatic early childhood.

“I first noticed it after I’d been adopted by my grandparents. I think because I was suddenly removed from a very violent situation and was now free of that kind of negativity, I suddenly had an opportunity to let my guard down.

“And when I let my guard down, I suddenly noticed that — although all the negative things had gone —when I’d sit at the end of the day, I was left with this restlessness. I was in a very loving home. I felt safe and cared for. I’d been catapulted into a world of flourishing, but it was as if all the trauma had hollowed me out, and I was left languishing.”

Corey Keyes with his dog.

It was a feeling that persisted into his teens and beyond. Keyes recalls a pivotal Sunday night, lying on his bed, listening to the radio — he was 16, about to learn to drive, he had good school grades — hearing the song that made him “feel profoundly seen for the first time in my life”.

The song was Jackson Browne’s ‘Running on Empty’ and it became Keyes’ high school anthem.

“I thought, oh my God, the lyrics! That’s exactly how I feel,” says Keyes, who says Browne didn’t use the words ‘lonely’, ‘sad’, or ‘anxious’ but perfectly captured the persistent feeling he had of “dully going through the motions of a life that seemed drained of colour.”

Keyes is adamant that what he felt was not depression, though later in life depression would come calling. “I wasn’t hopelessly sad. I didn’t have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. It was more that I was on autopilot, compelled to keep doing, to throw myself at activity after activity, leaving little room for the thoughts that rose up when I was alone. This feeling of restless emptiness eclipsed all aspects of my otherwise peaceful life,” he writes in Languishing.

His feeling of ‘running on empty’ was responsible for Keyes becoming a sociology professor. He wanted to understand what it was all about, and find out whether it haunted others too. He developed a 14-point questionnaire, which he says has been used by clinicians for decades as a holistic means of assessing wellbeing.

Taking the perspective of ‘flourishing’ — the opposite of ‘languishing’ — Keyes explains that each question probes a fundamental facet of wellbeing across emotional, social, and psychological domains.

His emotional wellbeing questions ask how often you feel:

• Happy;
• Interested in life;
• Satisfied with life.

On social wellbeing, he asks, how often do you feel:

• You have something important to contribute to society;
• You belong to a community;
• Our society is a good place for all people;
• People are basically good;
• The way our society works makes sense to you.

On psychological wellbeing, he asks how often do you feel that:

• You like most parts of your personality;
• You’re good at managing the responsibilities of your daily life;
• You have warm, trusting relationships with others;
• You have experiences that challenge you to grow and become a better person;
• You’re confident in your ability to think or express your own ideas and opinions;
• Your life has a sense of direction or meaning.

The frequency and degree to which you can positively answer these questions show whether you are flourishing or languishing, he says.

“For flourishing, you have to have at least seven of the 14 signs.”

He believes it is only when we “give ourselves silence and stop all the busyness” that we can very quickly find out if we’re flourishing or languishing.

“If we’re languishing, we’ll feel a discomfort coming over; it feels negative. We want to run from it by staying busy or working. Trying to distance themselves from it is where a lot of addiction comes from.

“But if you’re flourishing, silence and stillness feels like solitude — you’re content to sit in it,” says Keyes.

As he came to understand ‘languishing’, he also realised that multitudes felt it, too. He recalls one woman describing it as “like being on a plane circling above the runway but unable to land”.

This description captures, he says, how so many have described it to him — feeling “you’re not going anywhere, you’re circling, life feels out of control”.

Keyes doesn’t measure wellbeing by focusing on “feeling states” —feeling optimistic, happy, or strong.

“What if we directed our energy toward meeting a deeper set of needs? My research on the conditions that lead to good mental health — flourishing — has found that improving our psychological, relational, and social functioning builds wellbeing from the ground up.

“Learning to hold our emotions more loosely, change the stories we tell ourselves, become more accepting of ourselves and others, and form communities of care and belonging creates a virtuous cycle, increasing our tolerance for stress, adversity, and the pressures of modern living,” says the man who has advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and the World Happiness Forum.

Languishing still visits Keyes. “In the late afternoon, when I’m all done with a lot of the work, I think what’s it all for? But I’ve made peace with it now. I welcome it as a guest that has come to clear out anything I don’t need. I keep a clean house, literally and figuratively.”

By this he means he looks to the ingredients that make up a life of flourishing for him — a feeling of belonging, of
community, of warm relationships, and spirituality. Ingredients that come from his relationship with his wife, his yoga community, his “little neighbourhood” in the North Carolina mountains, where “a group of us get together every second Sunday for a shared dinner and games”.

These ingredients add up to flourishing — what Keyes calls his ‘North Star’.

• Languishing, Corey Keyes, €23.80.

Flourishing or languishing?

During the past month, how often did you feel... (options were every day, almost every day, two or three times a week, about once a week, once or twice, never).

Emotional Well-being 

1. happy 

0 1 2 3 4 5 

2. interested in life 

0 1 2 3 4 5 

3. satisfied with life 

0 1 2 3 4 5 

Criteria for flourishing: Can you circle 4 or 5 in response to at least one of these first three questions?

Social Wellbeing 

4. that you had something important to contribute to society 

0 1 2 3 4 5

5. that you belonged to a community (a social group, school, neighbourhood, etc.) 

0 1 2 3 4 5

6. that our society is a good place, or is becoming a better place, for all people 

0 1 2 3 4 5

7. that people are basically good 

0 1 2 3 4 5 

8. that the way our society works made sense to you

0 1 2 3 4 5

Criteria for flourishing: Can you circle 4 or 5 in response to at least six of the questions above and below? (Since both social and psychological well-being are a measure of healthy functioning, high marks in either category can meet the criteria for flourishing.) 

Psychological Wellbeing 

9. that you liked most parts of your personality 

0 1 2 3 4 5

10. that you were good at managing the responsibilities of your daily life 

0 1 2 3 4 5

11. that you had warm and trusting relationships with others 

0 1 2 3 4 5

12. that you had experiences that challenged you to grow and become a better person

0 1 2 3 4 5

13. that you are confident to think or express your own ideas and opinions 

0 1 2 3 4 5

14. that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it 

0 1 2 3 4 5

Your goal should not be to check every box every single day. You only need six of the eleven functioning well—any combination of social or psychological wellbeing—along with one of the three facets of emotional well-being almost every day to flourish. 

The combinations are almost endless, so you can flourish in your own unique way.